Visual Arts

Filippo Brunelleschi broo-nuh-LESS-kee (1377-1446)

A friend of Donatello, Brunelleschi was a skilled sculptor and goldsmith, whose 1401 competition with Lorenzo Ghiberti for the commission of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery is a frequent question topic (Ghiberti got the chief commission). As an architect, he is mainly known for the extraordinary octagonally-based dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (also known as the Florence Cathedral and often called the Duomo, though that is just the general Italian term for a cathedral), which dominates the Florentine skyline and is across the street from the Florence Baptistery. The task required an innovative supporting framework and occupied much of his career (as described in detail in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists). Other projects include the Spedale degli Innocenti (a hospital), the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo, and the Pazzi Chapel in the Cloisters of Santa Croce, all from 1421 to 1430.

Surrealism (1924-1930s)

According to André Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto," Surrealism is "pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought"; inspired by the work of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealists sought to represent an unseen world of dreams, subconscious thoughts, and unspoken communication. Similar to metaphysical painting and Dada, Surrealist works are not meant to be clearly understood — they are meant to puzzle, challenge, and fascinate by means of confusing titles, unusual arrangements of reality-based subjects, and abounding contradictions. Painters associated with the Surrealist movement include Salvador Dalí (The Persistence of Memory, Swans Reflecting Elephants, Metamorphosis of Narcissus), Joan Miró (Dog Barking at the Moon, The Tilled Field, Harlequin's Carnival), René Magritte (Time Transfixed, The Treachery of Images, The Son of Man), former Dadaist Max Ernst (Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, The Elephant Celebes), Frida Kahlo (Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, The Two Fridas, The Little Deer), former metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico (whose stark color contrasts and veristic style strongly influenced surrealist painting), and Yves Tanguy. Surrealist sculptors included Alexander Calder (Lobster Tail and Fish Trap, Flamingo), Meret Oppenheim (Object), and Alberto Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, L'Homme qui marche I). The Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel created a number of films in the surrealist style, collaborating with Dalí on Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) — which Roger Ebert called the "most famous short film ever made" — and L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age).

Variation

Alexej von Jawlensky

De Stijl (1917-1920s)

Also known as neoplasticism, De Stijl (Dutch for "The Style") was founded in Amsterdam in 1917 and sought to create paintings that were completely abstract, with no references to nature whatsoever. De Stijl paintings are typically set on a white background, use black lines to shape rectangular spaces, use only black and the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), contain no modulation, and use only perpendicular lines (diagonals are forbidden). While the movement's theories were outlined by Theo van Doesburg (Neo-Plasticism: Composition VII (the three graces), Composition decentralisee, Composition in Gray (Rag-Time)), the principal practitioner of De Stijl was Piet Mondrian (Broadway Boogie Woogie, Victory Boogie Woogie, Tableau I, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, Lozenge Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow); other De Stijl painters include Vilmos Huszar and Bart van der Leck. De Stijl also manifested itself in the architectural works of Gerrit Rietvald (Schroder House, Red and Blue Chair), Robert van't Hoff (Villa Henny), and J. J. P. Oud (Gallery house at Weissenhof Estate).

Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth. The Christina of the title is Christina Olson, who lived near the Wyeths' summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, Christina lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on Christina's dress. The Olson house was the subject of many Andrew Wyeth paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in Christina's World.

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper

As is often the case with his works, Hopper uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. Hopper's wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. Housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

View into a Lane

August Macke

Museum of Modern Art

Better known as "MoMA" and situated in Manhattan, it has been connected with the Rockefeller family since its founding in 1929. Its collection includes Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, and Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580)

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, Palladio designed villas in and near Venice, including the Villa Rotonda and Villa Barbaro. He integrated Greco-Roman ideas of hierarchy, proportion, and order with contemporary Renaissance styles. His Four Books on Architecture from 1570 relates his theoretical principles. Among architects heavily influenced by Palladio were Inigo Jones and Thomas Jefferson.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)

Born in Wisconsin, Wright worked under Louis Sullivan before founding a Chicago practice. His early homes, like the Robie House — which is adjacent to the campus of the University of Chicago — are in the "Prairie" style: horizontal orientation and low roofs. His "organic architecture" tries to harmonize with its inhabitants and site; examples include the Kaufmann House (also known as Fallingwater) in Pennsylvania; the Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin; and Taliesin, his home and studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. (There is also a Taliesin West, his home and studio in Arizona.) Other notable Wright works are the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Larkin Building in Buffalo, the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was one of few buildings to survive a 1923 earthquake (though it has since been demolished).

The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632), Rembrandt van Rijn

Commonly known as just The Anatomy Lesson. The painting depicts the yearly public dissection held by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, several of whose members paid commissions in order to be included in the portrait. Tulp's successor as the city anatomist, Jan Deijman, was also depicted by Rembrandt giving an anatomy lesson. The man being dissected is a criminal, Aris Kindt, who was hanged for armed robbery. A famous anatomy treatise by Andreas Vesalius can be seen opened at the painting's bottom right corner.

Organic Art

Constantin Brâncuși, Henry Moore.

Woman with a Hat, Henri Matisse

Depicts this artist's wife.

The Green Stripe, Henri Matisse

Depicts this man's wife.

Dada (1916-1925)

Deriving its name from a nonsense word that literally means "hobby horse" (supposedly chosen by stabbing a knife into a dictionary), Dada was an anti-art movement in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris, and New York that rejected artistic and social norms in order to protest the establishment. Fervently opposed to the useless slaughter of World War I, Dadaists rejected conventional methods of representation and exhibition: they abandoned oil and canvas, often did work on glass, and accepted "readymades" (commonplace objects selected and exhibited as works of art) as valid art forms. Dada works often relied on location or accident, such as if a glass should shatter, the artist would hail the accident as an enhancement or an achievement brought about by chance; much like many other abstract artists, Dadaists favored artistic concept over execution. The foremost proponent of Dada was Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades include Fountain, L.H.O.O.Q., Prelude to a Broken Arm, and Bicycle Wheel, in addition to the aforementioned non-Dada painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. Duchamp's piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), consists of two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust, and utilizes chance procedures; when the glass broke in a shipping crate and received a large crack, Duchamp left the cracks intact, incorporating the "accident" into the piece. Other key Dada artists include Jean Arp (Cloud Shepherd, Shirt Front and Fork), Man Ray (Lampshade, Le Violon d'Ingres), Raoul Hausmann (Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time), Kp'erioum, ABCD (Self-portrait)), Hannah Hoch (Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic), Francis Picabia, and Hans Richter.

Mexican Muralists

Diego Rivera, José Orozco, David Siqueiros.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí

First shown in 1931, is probably the most famous surrealist painting. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, Dalí's home. The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other Dalí paintings, and the trompe l'oeil depiction of figures is typical of his works. It currently belongs to the MOMA; its 1951 companion piece, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, hangs at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

The Bridge (Die Brücke) (1905)

Founded by Ernst Kirchner in Dresden, Die Brücke is so named because members of the movement saw themselves as the bridge between traditional and modern painting. Inspired by Fauvism, members of The Bridge followed similar ideals, utilizing violent juxtapositions of color; however, paintings of The Bridge were noticeably more intense, reflecting emotional agitation through scenes of city streets and sexually charged events in country settings. Besides Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, other prominent members of The Bridge include Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, Fritz Bleyl, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Otto Mueller.

Hermitage

Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its buildings include the Winter Palace, which was once the residence of Russia's tsars. Its most famous pieces include Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son and Henri Matisse's Red Room.

Depression-era art (1930s)

From 1929 to 1939, art in America reflected and embodied the despair associated with the Great Depression, often raising social issues and concerns of the public. American artists of the decade rejected European abstract art in favor of realism and raw human emotion in order to emphasize the true plight of the destitute. The photographer Dorothea Lange made the desperation of the Depression visible to the general public via documentary photography, such as with her works Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline, and Ditched, Stalled and Stranded; later, Lange would document the struggle of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Painters such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence developed the visual art aspect of the Harlem Renaissance (a period of rebirth and freedom of expression for African-Americans in the early 20th century), highlighting African-American life — such as in Douglas' Aspects of Negro Life series — and exposing social injustices committed towards Blacks — such as in Lawrence's 60-panel Migration series. Edward Hopper depicted somber and realistic scenes of city life, such as with his paintings Nighthawks, Chop Suey, Automat, and Early Sunday Morning. Similarly, Grant Wood explored country life — especially Midwestern subjects in rural Iowa — in such works as American Gothic, Daughters of Revolution, Parson Weems' Fable, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Appraisal, and The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa.

Dorfstrasse in Blau

Gabriele Munter

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926)

Gaudí created many extraordinary buildings in Barcelona in the early 20th century. His Art Nouveau-inspired works include the Casa Mila and Casa Batllo apartments, known from their undulating façades, and several works for patron Eusebi Guell, including the Parc Guell, a park in Barcelona. He spent 40 years working on the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family (also known as La Sagrada Familia), which will be finished in 2026. He was also fond of using hyperbolic paraboloids in his work.

Precisionism

Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth.

Andre Derain

Houses of Parliament at Night

Suprematism (1913-1920s)

Immediately prior to the Russian Revolution, a group of Russian artists formed the independent suprematist movement, so named because they believed that non-objective reality was greater than anything that could be achieved by representation; in his "The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism", suprematist founder Kazimir Malevich stated "By 'Suprematism' I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling." Suprematist works often consist of simple geometric shapes of limited color placed at diagonals or some thoughtful arrangement on a white background. Major works by Kazimir Malevich in the suprematist style include Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying, Black Square, Black Circle, Suprematist Composition: White on White, and Suprematism. After the communists took control of Russia, suprematism died out, much like many other abstract art movements under totalitarian governments.

Museo del Prado

In 1785, Spanish King Charles III commissioned a building to house a natural history museum, but his grandson Ferdinand VII completed the Prado as an art museum in 1819. Deriving its name from the Spanish for "meadow," the Prado's holdings include not only what is universally regarded as the best collection of Spanish paintings, but also a number of works from Flemish masters, such as Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, Francisco Goya's The Third of May, 1808, and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The National Gallery

In Trafalgar Square in London houses a synoptic collection of pre-1900 paintings assembled by government purchase and donation. It is home to British masterpieces including John Constable's The Haywain and both Rain, Steam and Speed and The Fighting Temeraire by J. M. W. Turner. The museum also boasts several major highlights of European painting, from arguably the best known of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers series to exemplar Baroque works like Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, The Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens, and the Rokeby Venus of Diego Velázquez. Major works of the Italian and north European Renaissance are also represented, including Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding, Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, Raphael's Portrait of Pope Julius II, and the later of Leonardo's two versions of Madonna of the Rocks.

Metaphysical painting (1910-1920s)

Influenced by the work of late 19th-century German philosophers, metaphysical painters sought to create enigmatic scenes which beckoned viewers to interpret a meaning based on symbols, suggestions, and impressions, thus foreshadowing the Surrealist paintings of the following decades. In many metaphysical paintings, human figures are represented by shadows or lifeless dummies and are placed in mysterious settings of seemingly infinite space, giving the canvasses dreamlike, eerie, and vaguely threatening qualities. Additionally, the paintings were given intentionally enigmatic titles to contribute to their cryptic effect. Metaphysical painting was based on the works of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico (The Disquieting Muses, The Song of Love, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, Le Reve Transforme), Giorgio's brother Alberto Savinio, and former Futurist Carlo Carra (The Oval of Apparition). The metaphysical painting movement came to an end in the 1920s after an argument between de Chirico and Carra over who had founded the group.

Futurism (1909-1914)

Inspired by the scientific and technological advances of the start of the 20th century, a group of Italian artists came together to form the Futurist movement in 1909, seeking to represent the glory of machines and speed in their art; in his "The Futurist Manifesto", Filippo Marinetti declared that "a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." The Futurists used a cubist-inspired approach to represent figures in multiple states at once, thus giving their works an animated yet shattered feel. Notable Futurists include Umberto Boccioni (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Development of a Bottle in Space, The City Rises, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Giacomo Balla (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Abstract Speed + Sound), Carlo Carra (Funeral of the Anarchist Galli), and Gino Severini (Armored Train in Action, Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin). Although Marcel Duchamp is not usually associated with Futurism, his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (which caused an uproar at the Armory Show in 1913) displays many characteristics of Futurist painting.

Otto Mueller

Landscapes with Yellow Nudes

The Proposition (1631), Judith Leyster

Leyster was a female artist whose entire body of work was once attributed to Frans Hals. The painting's two subjects are a woman sewing by candlelight and a man touching her right shoulder and offering her coins. Unlike in Vermeer's The Milkmaid, the foot warmer in this painting is partway under the woman's skirt, indicating that she is married, but potentially interested in a suitor. Despite this, the woman appears to be ignoring the man's romantic advances.

Rijksmuseum

Located in Amsterdam, this is the national museum of The Netherlands. Currently housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by P. J. H. Cuypers and completed in 1885, its most distinguished works include Rembrandt's Night Watch, Franz Hals's The Merry Drinker, and Jan Vermeer's The Milkmaid.

Uffizi Gallery

Located in Florence, Italy, the Uffizi Gallery was originally designed by Giorgio Vasari to serve as offices for the Florentine magistrates under Cosimo de' Medici — hence the name uffizi, meaning "offices." After Cosimo I died in 1574, the new grand duke, Francis I, commissioned the conversion of its top floor into a galley. Its outstanding Renaissance holdings include The Birth of Venus and La Primavera, both by Sandro Botticelli, and Titian's Venus of Urbino.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Located on the edge of Central Park and colloquially known as "the Met," its main building on Fifth Avenue was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Its collection includes El Greco's View of Toledo, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and John Singer Sargent's Madame X.

The Art Institute of Chicago

Located on the western edge of Grant Park in Chicago, the main building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and features two lion statues at its entrance (which are often decorated for special occasions, e.g. with jerseys when Chicago sports teams are in the playoffs). It has an outstanding collection of French Impressionist and American works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's At the Moulin Rouge, Grant Wood's American Gothic, and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Tate

Originally known as the National Gallery of British Art when opened in 1897, it was renamed for its benefactor, sugar tycoon Sir Henry Tate. The original Tate Gallery has been renamed Tate Britain, and there are now three additional branches: Tate Modern in London, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St. Ives in Cornwall. The Tate awards the Turner Prize, a highly publicized award for British artists, and its collection includes Whaam! by Roy Lichtenstein and many works by J. M. W. Turner.

Expressionism (1905-1930s)

Originating in Germany at the start of the 20th century, Expressionism sought to present the world from a purely subjective perspective, shaping images to maximize emotional effect and evoke certain moods or ideas. As such, Expressionists favored meaning and emotional experience over physical reality. Two major sub-movements of Expressionism were The Bridge (Die Brücke) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter)

I and the Village, Marc Chigall

Painted in 1911, among Chagall's earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to Chagall, notably the lamb and peasant life. In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb's head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. Is currently housed at MOMA.

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Marcel Duchamp

Painted in 1912 and created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Painted in various shades of brown, portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists.

Marianne von Werefkin

Part of "The Blue Rider"

I. M. Pei (1917-present)

Pei is among the most famous living architects. Born in China, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1935. Though he has also designed moderate-income housing, Pei is best known for large-scale projects. His works include the Mile High Center in Denver, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the John Hancock Building in Boston, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, and the recent Miho Museum of Art in Shiga, Japan. He may be best known for two fairly recent works: the glass pyramid erected outside the Louvre in 1989, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, completed in 1995.

Louvre

Perhaps the world's most famous museum, the Musée du Louvre is located on the right bank of the Seine River in the heart of Paris. Housed in the Louvre Palace, which was a royal residence until 1682, the Louvre was permanently opened to the public as a museum by the French Revolutionary government in 1793. During renovations carried out in the 1980s, a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei was installed at its entrance. Works housed within the Sully, Richelieu, and Denon Wings of the Louvre include ancient Greek sculptures such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Playing Naked People

Campbell's Soup Can, Andy Warhol

Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; Warhol's series of paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening). Also like the subject, the Warhol soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work. The same approach underlies Warhol's familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures.

Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) (1887-1965)

Possibly more influential even than Wright, he wrote the 1923 book Towards a New Architecture, standard reading in architectural theory courses. One famous Corbusian quote is "A house is a machine for living in." His floor plans were influenced by Cubist principles of division of space, and the Villa Savoye (Poissy, France) is his best-known early work. He wrote of the "Radiant City" begun anew, a completely planned city with skyscrapers for residents. Applications of his approach to government buildings (such as in Brasilia or in Chandigarh, India), however, largely failed, as did many urban renewal projects produced on the same ideological foundation. Nonetheless, he influenced every other 20th-century figure on this list.

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) (1911)

So named because of the founders' love for horses and the color blue (and the namesake of an early painting by Kandinsky), The Blue Rider was formed in Munich mainly around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Its members began to reject representational art and move towards abstraction, as they saw abstraction as a means of conceiving the natural world in terms that could surpass representation; according to Kandinsky's influential essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, blue is the color of spirituality, and the darker the blue, the more it awakens the human desire for the eternal. In addition to Kandinsky and Marc, other members of The Blue Rider include Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, August Macke, and Gabriele Munter.

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

Sullivan did not design the first skyscraper, but did become a vocal champion of skyscrapers as reflections of the modern age. Though most associated with Chicago, his best-known work is the 1891 Wainwright Building in St. Louis. His partnership with Dankmar Adler produced over 100 buildings. Later works, such as the Babson, Bennett, and Bradley Houses, reflect an organic architecture distinct from that of his onetime employee Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan's dictum that "form should follow function" strongly influenced modern architecture; his writings helped break the profession from classical restraints.

Karl Schmidt-Rotluff

The Factory

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and is — like its sister instutition in New York — less famous for its collection than its building, a Frank Gehry design that seems to be an abstract sculpture all its own. Richard Serra's The Matter of Time is permanently installed here.

Guggenheim

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is located in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Founded as "The Museum of Non-Objective Painting," in 1959 it moved into its current home, a Frank Lloyd Wright building that features a spiral ramp connecting the exhibition areas. Focusing on modern art, its holdings include the world's largest collection of paintings by Wassily Kandinsky.

The Night Watch (1642), Rembrandt van Rijn

The centerpiece of the collection of the Netherlands' Rijksmuseum, this painting depicts a schutterij, a type of civic guard common in Dutch Golden Age cities. The militia company is led by Frans Banning Cocq, who is depicted in black with a red sash, and his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, dressed in yellow. Other standout figures in the painting include a small woman in a yellow dress who carries a dead chicken, a symbol of the militia company. The painting is enormous, measuring nearly 12 feet high and 14 feet wide; it was even wider before it was cut down in the 18th century to fit in the Amsterdam Town Hall.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560s), Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The fall of Icarus is not the central image in this painting; the mythological youth's legs stick out of the water, barely noticed, near a large ship and a fisherman at the bottom right. Most of the painting depicts everyday scenes in the Netherlandish countryside, such as a farmer driving a horse while plowing his field and a shepherd staring up at the sky while attending to his sheep. In the distance can be seen a city with a harbor, which the ships in the painting appear to be sailing towards. The painting is famously depicted in W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," whose title derives from the Brussels museum where the painting is held.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

The leading architect of the International Style of skyscraper design, Mies (like Walter Gropius) worked in the office of Peter Behrens. He directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, shutting it down before the Nazis could do so. His works include the Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition; two adjacent apartment buildings at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago; the New National Gallery in Berlin; and the Seagram Building in New York, which he co-designed with Philip Johnson. Mies asserted that "less is more" as a principle of his architectural style. His glass-covered steel structures influenced the design of office buildings in nearly every major city in the U.S.

The Music Lesson (c. 1660s), Jan Vermeer

The painting is alternatively titled Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, an exact description of its subject matter. On the floor near the keyboard instrument lies a viol, a large bowed string instrument also common during the Baroque era. In the documentary Tim's Vermeer, Tim Jenison attempted to test the theory that Vermeer painted with the help of optical devices such as a camera obscura to achieve accurate perspective, a theory also advanced by contemporary British artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco.

Belshazzar's Feast (1635), Rembrandt van Rijn

The painting shows a scene from the Book of Daniel in which the king of Babylon, Belshazzar, uses the loot his father Nebuchadnezzar stole from the Temple in Jerusalem in order to throw a feast. During the feast, God's hand appears and writes a prophecy on the wall predicting Belshazzar's downfall—a vision that frightens the onlookers in the painting as well, one of whom is spilling a goblet in horror. The Hebrew letters in the painting are based on a font created by the Dutch rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, but are written top to bottom instead of right to left.

Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)

The son of architect Eliel Saarinen, Eero was born in Finland but spent most of his life in the U.S. and died in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He designed many buildings on the campuses of MIT and Yale, as well as Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. and the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Saarinen may be best known for designing the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, though he died before it was completed. Many of his works are characterized by elegant, sweeping forms, such as the Kresge Auditorium at MIT.

The Milkmaid (c. 1658), Jan Vermeer

The title is misleading, as it actually shows a house or kitchen maid, rather than a milkmaid working with cows. The painting's striking features include the tiny stream of milk being poured into a bowl and the intricate folds of the maid's blue dress. The table, which is covered with a blue cloth, is a Dutch gateleg, which has an octagonal shape when unfolded, explaining its odd angles. A foot warmer sits behind the central female figure; in Vermeer's time, the object would indicate that the woman is single.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pable Picasso

This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Paul Cézanne's "flattening of the canvas." The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of Picasso's influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA.

Hunters in the Snow (1565), Pieter Bruegel the Elder

This painting is the most famous of the five surviving paintings from Bruegel's Months of the Year cycle. Several black birds are perched in the barren, snowy trees above the hunters in this painting, who are returning home with their dogs, having had very little success in their hunt. The town's rivers and pond have frozen over, preventing its water wheel from working, but the denizens have taken advantage of this and are ice-skating. The painting features in several films by famous directors, such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Mirror.

The Art of Painting (c. 1660s), Jan Vermeer

This painting, alternatively known as The Allegory of Painting, may be either a self-portrait or a depiction of the artist's craft; the face of the artist dressed in black, who faces away from the viewer, cannot be seen. The blue-clad model in the painting stands near a window and may be portraying Clio, the Muse of History; she holds a trumpet and cradles a large yellow book presumed to be Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Behind the large candelabra in the painting, a map of the Low Countries hangs on the studio's back wall.

The Laughing Cavalier (1624), Frans Hals

This portrait, whose unknown subject is not actually laughing, acquired its common title after being moved to the Bethnal Green Museum in Britain in the 1870s; before that, it was simply known as Portrait of a Man. The painting's subject is dressed in fine black clothing appropriate to Calvinist sensibilities of the Dutch Republic, wears a giant white collar, has a prominent upturned moustache, and is 26 years old according to an inscription at the upper right hand corner.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Though Gropius designed the Fagus Factory (Alfeld, Germany) and the Pan American Building (New York City), he is best known for founding the Bauhaus. Beginning in Weimar in 1919 and moving to a Gropius-designed facility in Dessau in 1925, the Bauhaus school emphasized functionalism, the application of modern methods and materials, and the synthesis of technology and art. Its faculty included artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Josef Albers. Gropius would later head Harvard's architecture department from 1938 to 1952, shifting its focus to incorporate modern design and construction techniques.

Fauvism (c. 1905)

Upon seeing a number of Fauvist paintings in the same room as a classical sculpture at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibit, critic Louis Vauxcelles described the sculpture as "Donatello chez les fauves" ("a Donatello amongst wild beasts"), thus coining the art movement's name with an insult. To maximize the expressiveness of their canvases, Fauves disregarded figure modeling and color harmonies in favor of large brushstrokes with broad flat areas of violently contrasting colors. The poorly received Fauves — accused by critic Camille Mauclair of "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public," an accusation first leveled by John Ruskin against James Whistler — were led by Henri Matisse, whose works were singled out for attacks before being purchased by Gertrude and Leo Stein. Other Fauves include André Derain — who co-founded the movement with Matisse — Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen. Fauvism died out almost entirely by 1908.

Guernica, Pablo Picasso

Was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. Picasso had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World's Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. Picasso's Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain.

Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723)

When fire destroyed much of London in 1666, Wren was an Oxford astronomy professor who had designed his first building just four years earlier. Charles II named him the King's Surveyor of Works in 1669, and he was involved in rebuilding more than 50 London churches in the next half-century, including Saint Paul's Cathedral. An inscription near his tomb in Saint Paul's declares "Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you."

Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian

While Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and other Cubist paintings represent an extension of Paul Cézanne's division-of-space approach to the canvas, Mondrian's De Stijl works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular "tile patterns," as in Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA.

Frank Gehry (1929-present)

Winner of the 1989 Pritzker Prize, Gehry is best-known today for large-scale compositions like the EMP Museum (formerly known as the Experience Music Project) in Seattle, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the recent, controversial Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. (Bilbao natives describe the latter as "the artichoke," because of its layers of abstract titanium structures.) Gehry often uses uncommon materials such as plywood and limestone; his designs range from Kobe's Fishdance Restaurant, shaped like a giant fish, to the soft-sculpture look of the so-called "Fred and Ginger" buildings in Prague. He also designs furniture: the Easy Edges line is made of laminated cardboard; the Gehry Collection consists of chairs named for hockey terms (e.g. Cross Check and Power Play).

Cubism (1907-1930s)

With a name also coined by Louis Vauxcelles, cubism was developed almost entirely by Pablo Picasso, whose Les Demoiselles d'Avignon introduced the movement in 1907. Influenced by the simple geometries of African masks, Picasso's Cubism sought to allow an object to be viewed from many sides at once by breaking down the figures into angles and shapes. Cubism as a whole can be subdivided into three movements: analytical cubism (1907-1912), synthetic cubism (1912-c. 1930), and curvilinear cubism (1930s). Analytical cubism was highly experimental, showing jagged edges and sharp multifaceted lines, such as in Picasso's Girl With a Mandolin. Synthetic cubism was inspired by collages and featured flattened forms of normal objects, such as in Picasso's Mandolin and Guitar. Curvilinear cubism contrasted with the flattened and firm edges of synthetic by featuring more flowing, rounded lines, such as in Georges Braque's Houses at l'Estaque. Besides the aforementioned pioneers of cubism, Picasso and Braque (Pitcher and Violin, Viaduct at l'Estaque, Still Life with Metronome), other prominent Cubists include Juan Gris (Portrait of Picasso, Guitar and Pipe), Jean Metzinger (Deux Nus, Tea Time), Robert Delaunay (Simultaneous Windows on the City, La Ville de Paris), Albert Gleizes (The Bathers, Portrait de Jacques Nayral), Fernand Leger (Still Life with a Beer Mug), and Henri Le Fauconnier (L'Abondance).

American Gothic, Grant Wood

Wood painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic-style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, he used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. Among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by Wood upon its completion in 1930 (Wood won a bronze medal and a $300 prize).